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posted by
cmn32480
on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:01PM
from the you-can't-use-logic-to-justify-things dept.
from the you-can't-use-logic-to-justify-things dept.
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is now running a campaign to require that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The reason being that if it is public money, the code should be public as well. General benefits include overall tax savings, increased collaboration, public service, and fostering innovation. Money is currently being wasted on code that cannot be modified or even studied, let alone redistributed. Code paid for by the people should be available to the people!
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FSF Campaign : Public Money Should Mean Public Code
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday September 14 2017, @08:29PM (2 children)
Sorry, but bullshit. By moving large parts of the economy, you mean slave wages and the executives being vastly, vastly, vastly, overpaid for their anti-worker contributions. If we all had living wages and tremendously less one-sided duress when evaluating work offers, I might agree with you. We don't. So I couldn't give a fuck about whether or not those executives continue to get money. Especially with Citizens United and you basically handing them all of the extra votes. We already know how these people vote, which is always against the interests of small business and the American worker.
What you want to accomplish though, can be quite easily accomplished by a foundation with a board of directors comprised of the truly skilled and intelligent engineers and coders among us. One of the many reasons why SystemD sucks so much ass (and other code bases to lesser extent), is the lack of proper peer review. I no longer believe in that myth; Peer review will save us. There is public code that has been around for 20 years and vulnerabilities were found. When we actually looked, nobody was performing the activities thought to lead towards secure, free, and excellent code.
That is how you get your economic benefits. PAYING coders to contribute to the Public Domain. It's not unheard of either. We just had an article where some very valuable code was almost patented by Google, even though a gentlemen in Norway produced it specifically for the Public Domain. Coders need organization to protect themselves, and to get paid. I would rather see a large foundation, not corrupt as fuck like Redhat, create the code and help the economy by paying coders. Additionally, I see no reason why it cannot be publicly funded. My county *should*, and *could*, pay a few million to such an org to help keep the software high quality and updated.
That, and Microsoft produces shit. Windows 7 was the best thing they ever made, and now they moved on to cloud bullshit and shoving everything into Azure. I sure as fuck wouldn't want my tax dollars paying for shitty abhorrent code. Fuck, I would pay Apple before Microsoft.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 15 2017, @07:42PM (1 child)
No, by moving large parts of the economy I mean that getting you to pay for an annual subscription to Office 365 instead of downloading LibreOffice 5 and using it for ten years has a net economic benefit to the country.
I mean that Forbes (where I won't go but I'll quote headlines from Google) stated that Apple is worth about .5% GDP. I mean that IBM is larger economically than the country of Slovakia and Apple is larger than Bangladesh. ( https://makewealthhistory.org/2014/02/03/the-corporations-bigger-than-nations/ [makewealthhistory.org] )
The payment of any single person or even group of people DOESN'T MEAN A DAMN when it comes to comparing it with numbers like those.
Do I like that? Hell, no. I'd much rather see a worker-driven economy similar to what you describe. The world ain't been that way for quite some time, though. The reality is thus: The corporations drive the economy.
And all too often these magical little, "Oh, if people would only dump the corporate overlords the world would be free and beautiful," is past charmingly naive into dangerously idealistic. And unless you're prepared to pick up a gun and start shooting people who disagree with you, the system we have won't change. It's sad that it makes the trains run on time, but it does. Literally.
I agree with you about Microsoft. But in the end, it doesn't matter one whit if you're dealing with MS, or Apple, or HP, or IBM from a macroeconomic perspective. And from the macroeconomic perspective, having the congloms in the driver's seat is a far preferable alternative than most band-aid solutions I see proposed.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Friday September 15 2017, @09:00PM
Getting there. I'm not the only one saying it. I didn't even bring it up to this other person I speak with, and they came up with the idea of shooting the entirety of the 1% to get real change in America. Heck, that's reality. We now have Superman in the comics defending the homes and lives of the 1%. A fucking comic book now is trying to push back against it.
From the human perspective, killing the heads and investors of the congloms is preferably to letting them continue to kill the planet, and waging war on the poor.
Yeah. Pretty close. If civil war broke out tomorrow, I already know I'm not choosing other disillusioned pissed off workers to shoot. I'm choosing the board of directors of the local "health plan" that live like kings off what is supposed to be our medical care. I'm choosing the head of PG&E for his culpability in all the lives lost in the natural gas explosion, while he got a million dollar pay raise that year. I will choose the people truly responsible for the hell on Earth that we live now.
If civil war did break out, I would look into stealing a ton of money and paying the Yakuza to assassinate the 1% that escapes. Much better than finding some poor person I disagree with and proceeding to killing each other while the 1% survive like the hell bound cockroaches they are.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.